Google Cloud Platform launches its fourth region in North America

Google’s Cloud Platform now features four regions in North America. The company today announced the launch of its newest Cloud Platform region in Northern Virginia. This region, which answers to the lyrical name of ‘us-east4,’ complements the company’s existing regions in Oregon, Iowa and South Carolina.

In terms of cloud regions, Google has long lagged behind its competitors, but the company picked up a pretty aggressive pace in the last year or so. It also plans to launch regions in Sao Paulo, Montreal and California in the near future.

As for the Northern Virginia region, Google says its tests show a 25-85 percent reduction in round-trip latency for customers in New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto and Washington, D.C. compared to using the South Carolina data center. The new region features three availability zones, which is on par with most of Google’s current regions.

It’s worth noting that while Google now offers eight regions, competitors like AWS and Microsoft can currently offer their developers access to 16 and 34 regions, respectively.